by Stuart Woods
“If, on the off chance, I actually can lay my hands on them, have you got anything to support a charge of murder?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then how is it worth it to me to put a deputy on this? I can’t arrest ’em for parting their hair funny.”
“If you can tell me where to find them, I can put the NYPD onto them, and they might come up with something.”
“Well, if they do come up with something worthwhile, I’m going to want these folks back in my county.”
“There’s an extradition process for that.”
“Well, yeah.”
“I’d appreciate your help, Ray. Maybe we can clear this one, get it off your books.”
“I’d sure like that.”
Stone gave him his number. “I’ll look forward to hearing from you.” The two men ended the conversation, and Stone hung up. He buzzed Joan.
“Yep?”
“Where is Carrie Fiske’s stuff that was sent from New Mexico?”
“In the basement storage room.”
“Can you ask Fred to bring all of it into my office?”
“Sure thing.”
—
Ten minutes later Fred started carrying luggage into Stone’s office; it took him three trips. “Anything else, sir?”
“Not at the moment,” Stone said.
He put the largest suitcase on his desk and went methodically through it. Nothing but clothes, neatly packed. He went through the smaller case and found pretty much the same thing. The train case was all girl stuff. Her briefcase yielded an airplane e-ticket to New York, her passport, some keys, four checkbooks, some pens, and an envelope containing five thousand dollars in brand-new bills. He set it aside and went through the two photography cases, which contained, not surprisingly, cameras, lenses, film, and a tripod. In the larger case Stone found the 4x5 camera that he had seen on the floor in Carrie’s rental cottage. He examined it carefully and found that it contained a plate. He stopped himself from pulling it out of the camera, not knowing how to determine if the plate had been exposed. He buzzed Joan.
“Yep?”
“Will you call Bob Cantor and ask him to drop by here when he gets a chance?”
“Does that mean right now?”
“If he’s available.”
She hung up and called him back three minutes later. “He’s not far away—ten minutes.”
“Good.” Stone set the camera and case aside, picked up the handbag and emptied it onto his desktop. It contained everything he would expect to find in a woman’s handbag: wallet, credit cards and cash, makeup, hairbrush, a guide to Ghost Ranch, and a checkbook. And an iPhone 6.
Joan buzzed. “Cantor’s here, coming in.”
Bob Cantor walked into the room. “You rang, Your Lordship?”
“What?”
“I heard you’re a lord of the manor now.”
“Put that out of your mind.” He handed Cantor the camera. “This appears to have a plate in it, but I can’t tell if it’s been exposed, and I don’t want to ruin it.”
Cantor examined the camera, then he went to the case and found an aluminum plate, inserted it into the camera, and withdrew it with the plate attached. “There you go,” he said.
“Has it been exposed?”
“I don’t know. I can take it back to my darkroom and find out, and if it has, develop and print the shot.”
“Thanks, I’d appreciate that.”
Cantor left.
Stone picked up the iPhone and examined it. The number one appeared on the phone icon. He pressed it and found another number one on the voice mail icon. He pressed that and found a number. He pressed that, and a man’s voice said, “Hey, Carrie, got your message. We’ll see you around seven-thirty. Bye.”
Stone noted the date and the phone number, then compared it to the one Nicky Chalmers had given him for the Bedfords. It was identical. He checked the recent calls and found a call to a 505 area code number; he pressed the I icon and the Hotel Santa Fe, Hacienda & Spa came up. He called Ray Martinez. “You don’t have to do the search for the Bedford couple,” he said. “They were at the Santa Fe Hotel and Hacienda, and they left a message confirming a dinner date with Ms. Fiske the night before I found her body. You still might try for an address.”
“You done good,” Martinez said.
47
Stone wasn’t through with the iPhone; he pressed the photos icon and came up with dozens of photographs. He went carefully through them and was surprised to find his own face there: it had been taken at the East Hampton house. He looked through the same roll and found pictures of Nicky and Vanessa Chalmers and of Carrie Fiske, but there were no decent shots of Derek and Alicia Bedford. Each time a camera had been pointed at them they had managed to turn away or get a hand over their faces or otherwise prevent themselves from being photographed.
Joan buzzed. “Dino on one.”
Stone pressed the button. “Tell me you’ve got news.”
“I’ve got news, but not much. The Bedfords checked out of the Carlyle this morning. My people had a look at their suite and found the remains of a throwaway cell phone in a wastebasket, no SIM card.”
“Can any data be recovered?”
“It’s already in the lab, but they’re not optimistic.”
“I’ve got Carrie’s cell phone, and there’s a voice mail message that sounds like Derek, confirming a dinner date with her the night before I found her body. The call came from a Santa Fe hotel, and Sheriff Martinez is checking it out for an address, but given what you’ve just told me, I’m not hopeful.”
“I have still more news,” Dino said.
“Sorry I interrupted you.”
“The names Derek and Alicia Bedford came up as aka’s from the Palm Beach police, so we no longer know their names.”
“How did they register at the Carlyle?”
“Hang on a minute.”
“I’m hanging.”
Dino came back. “They were registered as David and Alexandra Bannister and had a credit card that contained a number, but not a name. This sounds very much like the card is connected to a numbered account at an offshore bank that protects its clients with anonymity. The hotel looked at it askance, but it worked, so they didn’t make a fuss.”
“So we know their new names.”
“For as long as they use them.”
“I notice that the first initials of each name are the same as before. Why don’t you canvass the high-end hotels for the new name, and if it isn’t there, check for names beginning with D, A, and B?”
“You know something? You should have been a detective.” Dino hung up.
Joan came on the phone. “Bob Cantor is on his way back here with a photograph,” she said.
“Good news.”
Bob arrived fifteen minutes later. “I’ve got something,” he said, holding up an envelope. He fished out a photo. “It appears to have been taken with the camera on the floor, looking up. You can see beams across the ceiling.” He held up a photograph of a man in left profile.
“Aha!” Stone said. “Progress. I found the camera on the floor of the cottage, and I speculated at the time that it may have been knocked over in a struggle.”
“Looks like the camera went off when it hit the floor. Do you recognize the guy?”
“I do. It’s somebody who called himself Derek Bedford, who has since changed his name to David Bannister.”
“I’ve got more,” Bob said. “I flopped the neg and printed it, so I’ve got a right profile.” He held up the print. “Then through a little photographic legerdemain, I put the two profiles together and got a full face, sort of, but not exactly, since it’s made up of two left profiles, and most people, if you draw a line down the middle of their faces and put two lefts or two rights together, look different.”
/> “This one looks different,” Stone said, “but it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing, which is what we had five minutes ago.” He buzzed Joan and asked her to fax the three photos to Dino, who called back in a flash.
“Where’d you get a photo of the guy?” he demanded.
Stone explained about the fallen camera and Bob’s work on the negative.
“Okay, I’m going to get this distributed right now, and we can fax it to our list of hotels.”
“You do that, pal, and maybe we’ll get somewhere.”
“Thanks for the photo. Now, have you got a motive for me?”
“I think they were after the Bloch-Bauer necklace, but it could just as well have been all of Carrie’s jewelry. The guy must have tried to beat or choke the safe combination out of her. What he didn’t know was that, in her purse, was a key to the apartment with a tab on the key ring that held the combination to the safe. He had it all and didn’t know it.”
“Where’s her jewelry now?”
“At Sotheby’s, where it will be auctioned. My appraiser says it’s worth millions, something like a hundred pieces.”
“Now we know what billionaires do with their money,” Dino said.
“She’s not even a billionaire. It just shows you that a girl can squeak by on a few hundred million bucks, until a billionaire comes along to take her away from all that.”
“I could squeak by on a few hundred million,” Dino said, “and you, my friend, are already doing just that.”
“Then I confirm my own judgment.”
“Okay, then tell me where to look for these two murderers.”
“Well, we know they were in the city until this morning, but they could have left. Probably not to Palm Beach, since they seem to be already known to the police there. I’d say they’re big-city people—L.A., Chicago, San Francisco, or maybe resort people—Aspen, Santa Barbara, like that. They seem to tend toward elegance and have expensive tastes. Maybe the FBI has something on them.”
“I’ve already queried them, but I haven’t had an answer yet. I’ll bug them again. Talk to you later.” Dino hung up.
“These people sound like they need the services of a good forger of identity documents,” Bob said. “Would you like me to make some inquiries in the netherworld?”
“If you can do it without putting yourself at risk, Bob.”
“I try to avoid that.”
“Something just occurred to me,” Stone said. “Don’t you have some software that allows you to look at hotel registrations all over the place?”
“I do. They all seem to use one of about three software packages, and I’ve got an in with all three.”
“Could you check current registrations for Derek and Alicia Bedford and for David and Alexandra Bannister?”
“As long as you don’t tell the cops where you got the info.”
“Of course not.”
“I’ll have to do this in my truck. Be back in a few.”
Stone twiddled his thumbs for a few minutes, until Bob returned. “Mr. and Mrs. Bannister checked into the Lowell, on East Sixty-third, an hour ago.” He gave Stone the suite number.
“Thank you, my friend,” he said.
“Wait a little while before you call Dino,” Bob said.
“If you think that will help.”
“It might.” Bob left.
Stone waited fifteen minutes, then called Dino.
48
Dino was on the phone in a flash. “Whataya got?”
“Don’t ask me how I know this, but David and Alexandra Bannister are registered at the Lowell, on East Sixty-third.”
“How do you know that?”
“You’ll just have to trust me.”
“That’s on the same block as my apartment.”
“I managed to figure that out.” He gave Dino the suite number. “I’d like to go along for the bust. I can identify them.”
“All right. Meet me there in an hour. It’ll take me a while to get uptown, and I want the pleasure, myself.”
“All right.”
“We’re going to do this softly, softly,” Dino said. “No flashing lights or sirens, no uniforms, no gangs busting in all at once, got it?”
“I have not a light, a siren, or a uniform, and I would make a poor gang member.”
“When you see my car out front, get in and I’ll tell you my plan.”
“I can’t wait to hear it.”
Stone returned some calls, then started for the door.
“Don’t forget,” Joan said, stopping him in his tracks, “you have an appointment at four o’clock with Senator Marisa Bond.”
“Damn it, I forgot about that.”
“It’s in your calendar, so that’s no longer an excuse.”
—
Stone got out of a cab at Sixty-third and Madison and spotted Dino’s car parked across the street from the hotel. He rapped on the window, and Dino opened the door and invited him in.
“Okay, what’s your plan?” Stone asked.
“You and I are going to go to the front desk and inquire as to whether Mr. and Mrs. Bannister are in, then I’m going to radio my team, and they’ll filter in in twos.”
“And what if they’re not in?”
“Hang on, I’m still making this up. Okay, got it—we’ll go up to their suite with a pass key and wait for them there.”
“Have you got a warrant for this?”
“Have you forgotten that you’re talking to the police commissioner of the City of New York?”
“Nope. Have you got a warrant?”
“It’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Half an hour later the warrant arrived in the hands of a breathless young patrolman in uniform.
“Get in the front seat,” Dino said to the young man. “Didn’t anybody tell you this is a plainclothes operation?”
“No, sir,” the young cop said.
“Sheesh!” Dino picked up his radio. “Okay, Barrington and I are going in. Give us a five-minute head start.” He got out of the car, and Stone followed. They walked into the hotel, and at the front desk Dino addressed the young woman on duty. “Good afternoon,” he said. “Do you know who I am?”
She pointed at him. “Don’t tell me . . . you’re Joe Pesci, the actor!”
Stone burst out laughing.
Dino flashed his badge. “I’d like to see the manager, please.”
She made the call. “He’ll be right out.” She pointed to Dino again. “Burgess Meredith!” she said.
“Mr. Meredith is a hundred years old, and a foot shorter than I am,” Dino replied.
The manager appeared. “May I help you? Oh, Commissioner, good day to you.”
“Good day.” Dino exposed a corner of an envelope in his inside jacket pocket. “This is a warrant,” he said. “Are Mr. and Mrs. David Bannister in their suite?”
“No, sir,” the desk clerk said, “they went out for some lunch.”
“Then I’d like a key to their suite, please.”
“Do it,” the manager said to the young woman, and she printed out a key card.
Dino put it in his jacket pocket. “Half a dozen other men will be joining me in just a minute,” he said.
“The elevators are there,” she replied, pointing.
Stone and Dino rang for an elevator; it arrived shortly, and they got in. As the doors began to close, a hand stopped them, and a couple got in. The doors closed, and the elevator started up.
Stone suddenly realized who they were. “Derek, Alicia,” he said, extending his hand. “It’s Stone Barrington.”
They didn’t miss a beat, and for a moment it was old home week. “Are you staying here, Stone?”
“Visiting friends,” Stone said. The elevat
or doors opened and Stone followed them out. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, “let me introduce my friend Dino Bacchetti.” Hands were shaken and smiles exchanged. “Dino,” Stone said, “is the police commissioner of New York City, and he has a warrant for your arrest.”
Derek/David put his key card in the door to his suite and opened it. “Come in, and let’s chat. After you, Commissioner.”
Dino entered, followed by Stone, and the door slammed behind them.
“Shit!” Dino yelled, yanking on the door. It wouldn’t open.
“He’s jammed it,” Stone said, trying to help. They were still working on it when there was a sharp rap on the door. “Police! Open up!”
“Put your shoulder against it!” Dino yelled. A couple of tries, and the door burst open.
“A handkerchief,” Stone said, pointing to it on the floor. “I didn’t know you could jam a door with a handkerchief.”
“Everybody downstairs!” Dino commanded. “You guys take the stairs.” He pressed the elevator button as the four cops headed down the stairs.
Dino got on the radio. “The subjects are on their way downstairs!” he yelled into it. They got onto the elevator, rode down, and emerged into the lobby. All was perfectly peaceful. A moment later four plainclothes cops burst out of the door to the stairs, pistols drawn.
“Find ’em!” Dino yelled.
Stone and Dino hurried to the street and looked both ways. Nothing.
Stone looked at his watch. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve got an appointment with a United States senator in half an hour. Let me know how this turns out.” He ran for a cab, leaving Dino fuming on the sidewalk, shouting into his radio.
49
Stone passed a limo parked outside his house and hurried into his office. “She’s waiting,” Joan said. He took a deep breath, calmed himself, and went in.
Senator Marisa Bond sat in a leather chair in his seating area, her surprisingly long legs stretched out before her. Bob sat beside her, his head in her lap. “Good afternoon, Mr. Barrington,” she said, offering her hand.
Stone took it: firm grip, long fingers. “I see you and Bob have become acquainted.” He studiously avoided looking down her cleavage and suppressed all carnal thoughts, which wasn’t easy, since she was more beautiful than she looked on TV.
